Buy Now...

While Microsoft is putting considerable marketing effort behind its Media Centre solution, there is an alternative route. You could opt for the DIY approach of upgrading your existing system. An obvious starting point would be to add television capabilities to the computer. This form of upgrade can be achieved quite easily and, in some cases, you do not even need to open up the system box as part of the procedure. I have recently been looking at the WinTV-USB2 product, from Hauppauge, which fits comfortably into this category.

This piece of kit, which does require Windows XP and a Pentium 1.5GHz processor, consists of the main WinTV-USB2 device with a full featured remote control. You also get various cables for connecting to a sound card, VCR and composite video source. Completing the kit is a software CD and slim Getting Starting Guide.

The WinTV-USB2 device is silver in colour and wedged-shaped. It measures 14 x 6cm (L x W) with a depth of 2cm at one end, rising to 3.3cm at the other. A USB cable, allowing connection to the computer, is permanently attached to one end while a socket for connecting to a TV aerial or cable lead is at the opposite end. As the product’s title indicates, you will need USB2 in order for this product to work. Other sockets for Line In, Line Out and S-Video are located along one side of the device.

See also: TV Tuners

more

After connecting the various leads, Windows XP will automatically recognise the presence of a new device and offer to install the necessary drivers. Once this process has been completed, you will need to run a setup program. While this process is straightforward, just a matter of following a series of on-screen prompts, it is rather time consuming. This is not altogether surprising when you realise that there are 15 different modules of which 12 are selected by default.

When this installation has been completed you will have an icon on your desktop that can launch the WinTV2000 application. The first time this program is run it will need to scan for the analogue television channels that are available to the WinTV-USB2 device. I was expecting it to find the five main channels but was surprising when it displayed a list of seven channels. Sitting alongside the expected BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five were two other channels which, in fact, were a duplicate of each other.

Testing each of the seven offerings revealed that the expected channels had good picture quality while the duplicated channel suffered from interference and was of poor quality. On closer examination, it turned out that the rogue channels were the Sky channel last viewed from my set-top box. I can only assume that the WinTV-USB2 device was picking up an echo from Sky as the aerial lead being used was also attached to the Sky box using a two-way splitter connector.

Earlier I mentioned that a lead was supplied for connecting to a sound card. However some PCs and laptops do not have external audio sockets. Audio capabilities are built-in to the motherboard. In situations such as this you can enable digital audio from live TV using the USB connection. Hauppauge has provided a batch file that will carry out this process. You will also need to change a setting from within the WinTV2000 application. The process is explained in the Quick Installation Guide.

The WinTV2000 software presents you with a viewing area that has various control options along two sides. While you can quickly switch the display to full screen mode, a limitation is placed on the minimum size of the program’s window. This does reduce the value of its always-on feature. I found the smallest window size I could achieve took up more space that I was comfortable with when working on other applications.

WinTV2000 provides basic PVR functionality by allowing you to record and play back television programs. The files saved will be located in a folder. These recordings can be activated manually or included as part of a scheduling option. You can set the start and end time, indicate a specific date with an option to record at regular intervals plus select the channel to be used. The scheduler will even start and close the program if required. Still images can also be captured and then saved to disk.

Although a remote control might seem like a useful addition, in practice this was not the case. Several of the features found on the remote control were not supported by the WinTV-USB2 device. You also needed a clear line-of-sight for the remote to connect to the device. Frankly I found it much easily and more convenient to use the on-screen controls and consigned the remote to a drawer.

Generally I was reasonable impressed with the ease of installation and general performance of this particular device. The viewing experience is not as satisfying as watching from a dedicated television set but it is more than adequate for occasional viewing within a working environment – the additional of teletext support would have helped justify the price of £49.99.

http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/pages/products/data_usb2.html